This is really, really, really old news. It even says above the article that

Updated: 6:54 p.m. ET Oct. 4, 2005

They actually announced it almost a year ago to people with Google accounts. It's kind of a shame that the mainstream media is just now
picking up on it - I think the Wall Street Journal finally ran a story yesterday on it.

You're probably right about the date screw-up, but I am sure that I got this info in a "what's coming" post in the "What's New" area at
Google...perhaps an earlier press release or something. Thanks for keeping an eye out!

I'm non-plussed about the spreadsheet. I never use them now and this isn't going to convince me to do so, but I suppose that it is a great service
for those that need it.

That's nice. I guess it will be using Ajax like the rest of their stuff. For now I'm using Thinkfree found over here, www.thinkfree.com... .
Weird that noone brought it up It's got the most common part of a office suite except a database editor and you get 1gb space. Another downside is
that it uses Java (not _javascript!) for editing files.

Originally posted by Mechanic 32
I love Google! Not just the search engine either.

Google Earth is one of my faves, and I also have a G-Mail account, googles e-mail service

I do not like Google.

The search engine gives many wrong results and lacks a very powerfull feature, proximity search.

Google Earth, as almost anything else from Google, was made by others, they just bought it. I was a user of the previous version (Keyhole).

As for these new applications that use the Internet, they are a good idea, as long as you have access to the Internet.

I did not try any of those apps, but I think that they would only work well with a fast connection. If that is the case, a fast connection is
something we can never be sure of having, unless we pay a good amount of money for a connection with a garanteed minimum speed.

The search engine gives many wrong results and lacks a very powerfull feature, proximity search.

Care to show me a search engine that gives perfect results 100% of the time? Screw 100%, you know of any engine that can at least give as good results
as Google, I'd really like to know about it.

I would also like to know how a proximity search would work without completely ripping away the rest of our fleeting privacy. It's a neat feature,
sure, but the potential for abuse is just mind-bogglingly huge I would never use the service if I could help it.

Originally posted by sardion2000
Care to show me a search engine that gives perfect results 100% of the time? Screw 100%, you know of any engine that can at least give as good results
as Google, I'd really like to know about it.

Unfortunately I cannot show it, it is part of the software that the company where I work sells.

In fact, one of our clients asked us to change some aspects so it was more like Google and afterwards they changed their minds and said that it was
good as it was after all.

I do not know if there is any search engine that shows better or as good results as those of Google because for that I would had to make a search
using Google and all the other search engines and then compare all the results to see if they were better or worse.

I would also like to know how a proximity search would work without completely ripping away the rest of our fleeting privacy. It's a neat feature,
sure, but the potential for abuse is just mind-bogglingly huge I would never use the service if I could help it.

I do not understand why our privacy would be in danger with a search engine where we can use something like "Google NEAR Microsoft" to only show us
the pages where the word Google is near the word Microsoft, that what I was talking about, maybe I used (again) the wrong words.

Altavista had it in the good old days and I miss that feature a lot, that way I could only search for what I wanted and not had to dig through pages
with a million words where the first and the last where the ones I wanted but they are separated by 999.998 words that have nothing to do with the
rest.

The fact that Google does not have that type of search has made possible, in conjunction with Google's popularity, the appearance of many sites that
simply harvest words and get their share of hits when someone does a search, and because of the way Google orders the results, those pages are usually
on the top of the results.

I do not understand why our privacy would be in danger with a search engine where we can use something like "Google NEAR Microsoft" to only show us
the pages where the word Google is near the word Microsoft, that what I was talking about, maybe I used (again) the wrong words.

Ohh... THAT type of proximity search. I thought you meant geo-location proximity.

As for that product you use at your work, it's proprietary isn't it? Why doesn't your company offer it to the public? If it works as good as you
say it does, then it should gain popularity pretty quickly.

Originally posted by sardion2000
As for that product you use at your work, it's proprietary isn't it? Why doesn't your company offer it to the public? If it works as good as you
say it does, then it should gain popularity pretty quickly.

We are thinking about that, but being a small company we have to take care not to show all our cards too early.

I got in with an invation. It's clear that this version was not meant for public release. Drag and dropping cells is not supported but I think that
it may be a _javascript limitation. In Firefox on GNU/Linux It slows down the whole browser and it lags while scrolling the window. I did also get
some importing errors while importing xls documents. Will try in Windows later and see how it goes.

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